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Engineering a Great Escape, Plus Karaoke

Getting Locked in an Office Building Is City's Newest Word-of-Mouth Hit

By

Marshall Heyman

April 29, 2014 8:37 p.m. ET

On a nightly basis on the 31st floor of a nondescript office building on West 30th Street, many people are getting locked in rooms. And it's not because they have too much work to do, but because they've bought tickets for the city's latest word-of-mouth hit, titled "Escape the Room," a kind of live-action "Clue."

Victor Blake, a 32-year-old former math major at Fordham University who, until recently, worked in quantitative financial modeling, always liked puzzles. Last summer, while he was living in...